Faculty Profiles

I am Professor of Sociology, Director of the Broom Center for Demography, and faculty affiliate in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California – Santa Barbara. My research explores gender inequalities around the world and the cultural and structural forces that sustain them in families, educational systems, and labor markets.

The contours of gender inequality vary a great deal across time and space. Sometimes differences are in the expected direction, with reputably gender-progressive societies showing much greater gender equality, and sometimes they are not. For example, most Americans would be surprised to learn that women’s representation among science degree holders is much higher in many majority-Muslim countries than in societies like Sweden and the United States. I explore contextual and intersectional differences in diverse inequality forms through large-scale survey research. Recent projects, with graduate students and other collaborators, include analyses of girls’ and boys’ attitudes toward science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) around the world, the gendered transmission of care work from parents to children, and beliefs about gender equality in 34 African countries. I have just completed co-editing a volume on Gender and STEM with UCSB colleague, Sarah Thébaud.

My comparative research on gender inequality has yielded three main theoretical insights so far. First, I have identified “male primacy” and “gender essentialism” as two empirically distinct tenets of gender ideology. I argue that gender essentialism (cultural beliefs about innate gender difference) is easily reconciled with the liberal individualistic understandings of equality that predominate in Western industrial countries and the world polity today, while male primacy is not. Second, I have shown that different forms of gender inequality operate according to distinct causal logics. Liberal-egalitarian cultural ideals help delegitimize inequalities based on overt exclusion and hierarchical sorting of men and women, but they do little to undermine inequalities that arise out of gender-essentialist stereotypes and identities. Third, I have argued that a strong cultural emphasis on self-expression in affluent democracies amplifies the effects of gender-essentialist stereotypes on educational and occupational outcomes. For example, cultural ideals of “doing what we love” may lead more young people to base career choices on stereotypes about what men and women love.

I have published extensively on the phenomenon of gender segregation, most recently on the ideological and organizational factors that contribute to woman's underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ("STEM") fields around the world. My book with David Grusky, Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (Stanford University Press) received the Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship in 2005. And the article "Indulging our Gendered Selves? Sex Segregation by Field of Study in 44 Countries" (American Journal of Sociology, coauthored with Karen Bradley), received the 2011 Distinguished Article Award from the American Sociological Association's Sex and Gender Section.

I am an elected member of the Sociological Research Association and the recipient of numerous research awards and grants for comparative work on gender segregation and gender belief systems around the world. Before arriving at UCSB, I served on the Sociology faculty at UC San Diego, and I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. I received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University, and Bachelor’s degrees from UCSB in Environmental Studies and Political Science. My CV is here.

Chow, Tiffany and Maria Charles. Forthcoming. “An Inegalitarian Paradox: On the Uneven Gendering of Computing Occupations around the World.” In A Global Perspective on Women in Computing. Carol Frieze and Jeria Quesenberry, eds. Cambridge University Press.